Our board chair, Dr Brian Moench, recently published an opinion piece on the air pollution and public health impacts of prescribed burning.
Citing the example of two prescribed burns earlier this year in Montana that caused extreme and dangerous levels of air pollution—PM2.5 levels reached a shocking 789 μg/m3 in Helena—Dr Moench wrote:
There is no credible dispute that the Forest Service put the entire town of Helena in a life-threatening situation from their prescribed burn. Whatever the agency’s goals of the intentional burn, they could not have justified the outcome.
Dr Moench noted that at least 10,000 deaths annually in the US are linked to exposure to wildfire smoke, but slightly more are linked to smoke from prescribed fires. “No physician would be allowed to perform a ‘preventive’ operation where over half the patients died.”
The full opinion piece has been published in a few news outlets, including the Daily Herald in Utah and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
